Henning Mankell: Faceless Killers

“It’s Johannes or Maria,” he says. “One of them is calling for help.”

She gets out of bed and goes over to the window. Big and wide, she stands there in her white nightgown and looks out into the dark.

“The kitchen window isn’t open,” she whispers. “It’s smashed.”

He goes over to her, and now he’s so cold that he’s shaking.

“There’s someone shouting for help,” she says, and her voice quavers.

“What should we do?”

“Go over there,” she says. “Hurry up!”

“But what if it’s dangerous?”

“Aren’t we going to help our best friends if something has happened?”

He dresses quickly, takes the flashlight from the kitchen cupboard next to the corks and coffee cans.

The clay outside is frozen under his feet. When he turns around he catches a glimpse of Hanna in the window.

Up by the fence he stops. Everything is quiet. Now he can see that the kitchen window is broken. Cautiously he climbs over the low fence and approaches the white house. But no voice calls to him.

I’m just imagining things, he thinks again. I’m an old man who can’t figure out what’s really happening anymore. Maybe I even dreamed about the bulls last night. The old dream about the bulls charging toward me when I was a boy and making me realize that someday I would die.

Then he hears the cry again. It’s weak, like a moan. It’s Maria.

He goes over to the bedroom window and peeks in cautiously through the gap between the curtain and the window frame.

Suddenly he knows that Johannes is dead. He shines his flashlight inside and blinks hard before he forces himself to look.

Maria is crumpled up on the floor, tied to a chair. Her face is bloody and her false teeth lie broken on her spattered nightgown.

Then he sees one of Johannes’s feet. All he can see is his foot. The rest of his body is hidden by the curtain.

He limps back and climbs over the fence again. His knee aches as he desperately stumbles across the frozen clay.

First he calls the police.

Then he takes his crowbar out of a closet that smells like mothballs.

“Wait here,” he tells Hanna. “You don’t need to see this.”

“What happened?” she asks with tears of fear in her eyes.

“I don’t know,” he says. “But I woke up because the mare wasn’t neighing in the night. I know that for sure.”

It is the eighth of January, 1990.

Not yet dawn.

The incoming telephone call was recorded by the Ystad police at 5:13 AM. It was taken by an exhausted officer who had been on duty almost without a break since New Year’s Eve. He had listened to the stammering voice on the phone and thought that it was just some deranged senior citizen. But something had sparked his attention nevertheless. He started asking questions. When the conversation was over, he hesitated for just a moment before lifting the receiver again and dialing a number he knew by heart.

Kurt Wallander was asleep. He had stayed up far too long the night before, listening to recordings of Maria Callas that a good friend had sent him from Bulgaria. Again and again he had returned to her Traviata , and it was close to two AM before he finally went to bed. By the time the ring of the telephone roused him from sleep, he was deep in an intense erotic dream. As if to assure himself that he had only been dreaming, he reached out and felt the covers next to him. But he was alone in the bed. Neither his wife, who had left him three months earlier, nor the black woman with whom he had just been making fierce love in his dream, was present.

He looked at the clock as he reached for the phone. A car crash, he thought instantly. Treacherous ice and someone driving too fast and then spinning off E14. Or trouble with refugees arriving on the morning ferry from Poland.

He scooted up in bed and pressed the receiver to his cheek, feeling the sting of his unshaven skin.

“Wallander.”

“I hope I didn’t wake you.”

“No, damn it. I’m awake.”

Why do I lie? he thought. Why don’t I just say it like it is? That all I want is to go back to sleep and recapture a fleeting dream in the form of a naked woman.

“I thought I should call you.”

“Traffic accident?”

“No, not exactly. An old farmer called and said his name was Nyström. Lives in Lenarp. He claimed that the woman next door was tied up on the floor and that someone was dead.”

Wallander thought quickly about where Lenarp was located. Not so far from Marsvinsholm, in a region that was unusually hilly for Skåne.

“It sounded serious. I thought it best to call you at home.”

“Who have you got at the station right now?”

“Peters and Norén are out looking for someone who broke a window at the Continental. Shall I call them?”

“Tell them to drive out to the crossroads between Kade Lake and Katslösa and wait there till I show up. Give them the address. When did the call come in?”

“A few minutes ago.”

“Sure it wasn’t just some drunk calling?”

“Didn’t sound like it.”

“Huh. All right then.”

Wallander dressed quickly without showering, poured himself a cup of the lukewarm coffee that was still in the thermos, and looked out the window. He lived on Mariagatan in central Ystad, and the façade of the building across from him was cracked and gray. He wondered fleetingly whether there would be any snow in Skåne this winter. He hoped not. Scanian snowstorms always brought periods of uninterrupted drudgery. Car wrecks, snowbound women going into labor, isolated old people, and downed power lines. With the snowstorms came chaos, and he felt ill equipped to meet the chaos this winter. The anxiety of his wife leaving him still burned inside him.

He drove down Regementsgatan until he came out on Osterleden. At Dragongatan he was stopped by a red light, and he turned on the car radio to listen to the news. An excited voice was talking about a plane that had crashed on some far-off continent.

A time to live and a time to die , he thought as he rubbed the sleep from his eyes. He had adopted this incantation many years ago. Back then he was a young policeman cruising the streets in his home town of Malmö. A drunk had suddenly pulled out a big butcher knife as he and his partner were trying to take him away in the squad car from Pildamm Park. Wallander was stabbed deep, right next to his heart. A few millimeters were all that saved him from an unexpected death. He had been twenty-three then, suddenly profoundly aware of what it meant to be a cop. The incantation was his way of fending off the memories.

He drove out of the city, passing the newly built furniture warehouse at the edge of town, and caught a glimpse of the sea in the distance. It was gray but oddly quiet for the middle of the Scanian winter. Far off toward the horizon there was the silhouette of a ship heading east.

The snowstorms are on their way, he thought.

Sooner or later they’ll be upon us.

He shut off the car radio and tried to concentrate on what was in store for him.

What did he know, really?

An old woman, tied up on the floor? A man who claimed he saw her through a window? Wallander sped up after he passed the turnoff to Bjäre Lake and thought that it was undoubtedly an old man who was struck by a sudden flare-up of senility. In his many years on the force he had seen more than once how old, isolated people would call the police as a desperate cry for help.

The squad car was waiting for him at the side road toward Kade Lake. Peters had climbed out and was watching a hare bounding back and forth out in a field.

When he saw Wallander approaching in his blue Peugeot, he raised his hand in greeting and got in behind the wheel.